I Went Looking for Barcelona and Found Jordi Lafebre

It started with Sant Jordi.

In the weeks before 23 April, Barcelona becomes rather difficult to separate from books and roses. Bookshops fill up, stalls begin appearing, and even Casa Batlló ends up covered in red roses.

I was looking for a book for Javi.

And somewhere along the way I had a very simple thought: if I was already spending this much time looking at books, why shouldn’t I buy one for myself?

I started wandering through the comic and graphic novel sections of Casa del Libro.

I wasn’t looking for a new hobby, and I certainly wasn’t conducting any systematic exploration of Spanish comics. I simply wanted something I would enjoy reading.

More specifically, I wanted Barcelona.

Not just a story that happened to be set there. I wanted a comic in which the city was visible enough to recognise: its streets, façades, rooftops, familiar buildings, the particular visual rhythm a place develops once you have lived in it for a while.

That is how I bought Nada.

There is something strangely satisfying about seeing a city you know drawn by somebody else. A real building becomes a few lines. A street you could walk down tomorrow becomes part of a panel. You recognise the place, but you are also seeing somebody else’s version of it.

That was what I had been looking for.

Then I found Jordi Lafebre.

Soy su silencio, a crime story set in Barcelona, caught my attention partly for exactly the same reason. By the time I bought it, I was back in Poland, so I got the Polish edition, Jestem ich milczeniem.

Barcelona is everywhere in it without being reduced to a postcard. Apartment buildings, rooftops, streets, the Sagrada Família rising out of the ordinary fabric of the city. Even the opening and closing pages return to Barcelona itself.

It was precisely the kind of comic I thought I had been searching for.

Except that somewhere in the process, the search changed.

I liked Lafebre’s drawing, but I liked his storytelling even more.

So when I returned to Barcelona, I wanted another one.

Then came Soy un ángel perdido. Later, Carta Blanca. Los buenos veranos is already waiting on my list.

At some point I realised that I was no longer searching for comics because Barcelona happened to appear in them.

I was searching for Jordi Lafebre.

There is a particular pleasure in finding an author whose work begins to feel familiar. You open another book and recognise the line, the faces, the humour, the rhythm of the panels. Not because every story is the same, but because you recognise the person telling it.

This also happens to be one of the ways I now read more in Spanish. Some of the books are available to me in Polish, some are not, and sometimes the edition I want simply happens to be Spanish. But language practice was never the reason I started doing this.

Sant Jordi was.

Or perhaps Barcelona was.

I went looking for a book for someone else, decided I deserved one too, started searching for Barcelona in comics and ended up finding an author I now follow from one story to the next.

Sometimes hobbies seem to begin with a plan.

This one began with a bookshop, a city covered in roses and the thought: I might as well get something for myself.